Tiled titanium: sapphire laser amplification guarantees to improve the speculative capability of ultra-intense ultrashort lasers for strong-field laser physics.Ultra-intense ultrashort lasers have a wide-ranging scope of applications, encompassing standard physics, nationwide security, industrial service, and health care. In standard physics, such lasers have actually become a powerful tool for looking into strong-field laser physics, especially for laser-driven radiation sources, laser particle velocity, vacuum quantum electrodynamics, and so on.Evolution of Laser Power and TechnologyA remarkable boost in peak laser power, from the 1996 1-petawatt “Nova” to the 2017 10-petawatt “Shanghai Super-intense Ultrafast Laser Facility” (SULF) and the 2019 10-petawatt “Extreme Light Infrastructure– Nuclear Physics” (ELI-NP), is due to a shift in gain medium for large-aperture lasers (from “neodymium-doped glass” to “titanium: sapphire crystal”). “By including a 2 × 2 coherently tiled titanium: sapphire high-energy laser amplifier in Chinas SULF or EUs ELI-NP, the present 10-petawatt can be further increased to 40-petawatt and the focused peak strength can be increased by almost 10 times or more,” says Leng.The approach guarantees to enhance the speculative ability of ultra-intense ultrashort lasers for strong-field laser physics.Reference: “Coherently tiled Ti: sapphire laser amplification: a way to break the 10 petawatt limitation on present ultraintense lasers” by Yanqi Liu, Keyang Liu, Zhaoyang Li, Yuxin Leng and Ruxin Li, 23 December 2023, Advanced Photonics Nexus.DOI: 10.1117/ 1.
Coherently tiled titanium: sapphire laser amplification. Credit: Yuxin Leng [cm_tooltip_parse] [/cm_tooltip_parse] Tiled titanium: sapphire laser amplification guarantees to enhance the experimental ability of ultra-intense ultrashort lasers for strong-field laser physics.Ultra-intense ultrashort lasers have an extensive scope of applications, including fundamental physics, national security, commercial service, and health care. In standard physics, such lasers have actually become an effective tool for looking into strong-field laser physics, especially for laser-driven radiation sources, laser particle acceleration, vacuum quantum electrodynamics, and so on.Evolution of Laser Power and TechnologyA significant boost in peak laser power, from the 1996 1-petawatt “Nova” to the 2017 10-petawatt “Shanghai Super-intense Ultrafast Laser Facility” (SULF) and the 2019 10-petawatt “Extreme Light Infrastructure– Nuclear Physics” (ELI-NP), is due to a shift in gain medium for large-aperture lasers (from “neodymium-doped glass” to “titanium: sapphire crystal”). That shift minimized the pulse period of high-energy lasers from around 500 femtoseconds (fs) to around 25 fs.Limitations and Innovations in Laser TechnologyHowever, the upper limit for titanium: sapphire ultra-intense ultrashort lasers seems 10-petawatt. Currently, for 10-petawatt to 100-petawatt advancement preparation, researchers generally desert the titanium: sapphire chirped pulse amplification technology, and turn to optical parametric chirped pulse amplification technology, based upon deuterated potassium dihydrogen phosphate nonlinear crystals.That innovation, due to its low pump-to-signal conversion effectiveness and bad spatiotemporal-spectral-energy stability, will position a terrific obstacle for the realization and application of the future 10– 100 petawatt lasers. On the other hand, the titanium: sapphire chirped pulse amplification technology, as a fully grown technology that has actually effectively recognized 2 10-petawatt lasers in China and Europe, still has fantastic possible for the next-stage development of ultra-intense ultrashort lasers.Challenges With Titanium: Sapphire CrystalsTitanium: sapphire crystal is an energy-level-type broadband laser gain medium. The pump pulse is absorbed to develop a population inversion between the upper and lower energy levels, which finishes the energy storage. When the signal pulse travels through the titanium: sapphire crystal numerous times, the stored energy is extracted for laser signal amplification. However, in transverse parasitic lasing, an amplified spontaneous emission noise along the crystal diameter takes in the saved energy and minimizes the signal laser amplification.Currently, the maximum aperture of titanium: sapphire crystals can only support 10-petawatt lasers. Even with bigger titanium: sapphire crystals, laser amplification is still not possible due to the fact that strong transverse parasitic lasing increases tremendously as the size of the titanium: sapphire crystals increases.Innovative Solutions and Future PotentialIn action to this obstacle, researchers have taken an ingenious technique that includes coherently tiling several titanium: sapphire crystals together. As reported on December 23, 2023, in Advanced Photonics Nexus, this approach breaks through the present 10-petawatt limit on the titanium: sapphire ultra-intense ultrashort lasers, effectively increasing the aperture diameter of the entire tiled titanium: sapphire crystal and also truncating the transverse parasitic lasing within each tiling crystal.Corresponding author Yuxin Leng of the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics notes, “The tiled titanium: sapphire laser amplification was successfully demonstrated in our 100-terawatt (i.e., 0.1-petawatt) laser system. We achieved near-ideal laser amplification utilizing this innovation, including high conversion effectiveness, steady energies, broadband spectra, brief pulses, and little focal spots.” Lengs group reports that coherently tiled titanium: sapphire laser amplification supplies a inexpensive and reasonably simple way to exceed the existing 10-petawatt limitation. “By including a 2 × 2 coherently tiled titanium: sapphire high-energy laser amplifier in Chinas SULF or EUs ELI-NP, the current 10-petawatt can be even more increased to 40-petawatt and the focused peak strength can be increased by nearly 10 times or more,” states Leng.The method guarantees to boost the experimental ability of ultra-intense ultrashort lasers for strong-field laser physics.Reference: “Coherently tiled Ti: sapphire laser amplification: a way to break the 10 petawatt limitation on current ultraintense lasers” by Yanqi Liu, Keyang Liu, Zhaoyang Li, Yuxin Leng and Ruxin Li, 23 December 2023, Advanced Photonics Nexus.DOI: 10.1117/ 1. APN.2.6.066009.
